Just sumthin I've been thinking about today.
Who is ALICE? Dodgson's lass
> leads to
Double, double toil & trouble…a spell>
Dodgson's doublet code>
Like when Q uses a word in all caps
Or
Dodgson's the red shift code>
Uses a keyword
Yes he wrote the alice series but he was first and foremost a mathematician who liked puzzles.
In his book, Euclid and his Modern Rivals, Dodgson clearly expresses the importance of Euclidian geometry as a basis for our perception of the world. He speaks of a world in which parallel lines never meet. He criticizes the concepts that were then developing; these concepts acknowledged infinity as part of the world and considered numbers as mere instruments emptied of any symbolic value. Why would Dodgson be so resistant to the non-Euclidian geometries ? I do not think that he was simply rejecting them. I would claim that for him they were essential to an understanding of the world but at a poetic or fictional level.
Hence, Dodgson's work as a mathematician and a geometrician– a defender of the principles of Euclid– is very important in order to understand the other side of his work, his fiction books. Both sides of his work are intimately related. Putting them in parallel through a careful reading, they might eventually shed light on each other.
What is the space of Euclidian geometry?
A story about time and space.
For the pre-Cartesien thinker (as well as for some thinkers after Descartes(3) who were reacting against his ideas), the geometric figures were not, in their ideal essence, part of the world of lived experience. They related the absolute and irrevocable truths of the world of Ideas. Like numbers in the realm of mathematics, the figures of geometry expresed, by analogy, the order of the cosmos, the order of things, and in that sense, revealed the harmony that governs nature. But there could not be such a thing as a perfect triangle either in nature or in the artifacts of men, for the human world remained mysterious, uncontrollable and overwhelming. In this chaotic world, space was not a preexisting and autonomous entity. It had to be ordered, created but mostly, it had to be kept alive and recreated now and then. Space and time were works of art.
In some ancient mythologies, space and time were gods that could not be separated– they were two expressions of the same order(4). Today, the big revolving door of time is out of its joints(5), off its hinges, fragmented, dislocated, no longer ordered into a circular movement in space according to the cardinal directions. Time, as we now conceive of it, is the linear time of modern history. The line of time is an infinite line in both directions.